CONSTRUCTION AND ANALYSIS OF PHOTOREALISTIC 3D VIRTUAL MODELS

The Arbuckle Mountains in southern Oklahoma were formed during the late Paleozoic Ouachita-Marathon orogeny. They are exposed in road cuts in southern Oklahoma along a seven mile stretch of Interstate-35. The area has been well studied and serves as a site for field trips for professional associations and for college level geology courses. 3D photorealistic virtual models have been constructed for three major sites along the I35 road cuts – an anticline/syncline structure in the southern limb of the Arbuckle Anticline, the hinge area of the anticline, and the unconformal contact of the overlying Collings Ranch Conglomerate and the northern limb. The areas were scanned with a high speed terrestrial laser scanner and photographed from several different angles. The scan locations were registered with GPS control for subsequent inclusion in a 3D model which spans several miles. Three dimensional Trianglated Irregular Network (TIN) models were generated from the laser scanner point clouds using commercial software. The photographs were then oriented and overlain on the 3D TIN model using programs created at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). The resulting model is output in the Wavefront® (.obj) file format and displayed in the open-source OpenSceneGraph® viewer. In addition to providing detailed viewing of the structures in a 3D environment, such as Geo-Wall, strike-dip data can be extracted for fault surfaces, bedding planes, and fractures.